Fear the Dark
by Participle
Summary: Alex believed the Hunter Gratzner was her vessel to freedom. Instead the ship crashes onto a hellish planet and Alex, along with the other survivors, finds herself in a race against the encroaching darkness and the creatures that live within it. Things become complicated, however, when Alex's strange abilities catch the attention of a certain goggle-wearing criminal.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** So, this is actually a rewrite of a story that I had up on FF several years ago. For some reason the story was deleted from my account, and naturally I did not have the story backed up on my computer. (I know, I know. What kind of writer doesn't save a copy of their work on their computer? I was careless!) Anyway, I was so devastated about losing the story that I never went back to try and recreate it. But I love Pitch Black, and every time I watch the movie I imagine my OC inserted into the storyline. It became clear that I needed to go ahead and rewrite this story since I obviously can't seem to let it go.

I tried to keep it close to the original story I wrote, as much of it as I could remember, but I've also made some changes. For instance, the OC used to be named Aiden, but now she's named Alex. Small change, I know. Also, some of this will read close to the movie's plot, but I've also inserted more original dialogue/scenes, and will continue to do so as the story progresses.

This will be a romance, but it will be a slow build. It just wouldn't make sense otherwise. I will try to keep everyone in character as much as possible, but I'm also going to explore aspects of the character's personalities and pasts that the movie does not, so some OOCness is to be expected. Please bear with me.

Obviously, I do not have any rights to Riddick or Pitch Black. Loathe as I am to admit that.

* * *

 **Chapter One: The Crash**

* * *

There were Chasers roaming the docking port.

Alex pulled her hood tight over her head and kept her face down, trying not to draw attention to herself as she waited in line to board the Hunter Gratzner, her vessel to freedom.

Chasers were hired investigators, little better than mercs except that they were paid better and were only ever hired to bring people in alive. They were instantly recognizable by their white uniforms, and the tranquilizer guns they carried. Chasers were known to be tough, tenacious, and absolutely ruthless in the pursuit of their targets. They were there looking for her.

Alex had been on the run for a little less than a week. Her escape from the Institute had been a fluke. A brainless tech had accidentally exposed a deadly virus and the lab's hardwired safety protocols had kicked in, commencing a system-wide decontamination. The entire place had gone up in flames, and only Alex had made it out alive.

Of course she had survived. That's what _he_ had modified her to do.

Dr. Farren, her adoptive father and her torturer. The man who had taken her in after her parents had died, had been kind, indulgent, understanding, and whom she had loved dearly. The man who had betrayed her, and who had turned her into a science experiment.

A Chaser walked past Alex's elbow and it was all she could do not to cringe away from him. She reminded herself that they were looking for a girl with long brown hair and bright green eyes. She had chopped her hair off to just above her shoulders, and with her hood up and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses over her eyes she looked just different enough for them to pass her by without a second glance. Her baggy clothes also helped to disguise her and made her look more like an adolescent boy than the petite girl that she was.

She clutched her boarding pass in her fist and breathed out in relief when the Chaser moved on. Her ticket onto the Hunter Gratzner had been another fluke. She'd been without money when she left the Institute, and everything stuffed into the bag over her shoulder had simply been stolen over the past week. The ticket had been in the pocket of a pair of cargo pants that she had taken off someone's clothesline. It had been washed with the pants and was crumpled and flaking, but still intact. She had seen it as a beacon of hope, a means of escape to somewhere she might be safe from Dr. Farren's reach.

When she approached the entrance to the ship she held the boarding pass out to a smiling crewmember. He had dark hair, a friendly face, and twinkling, earnest eyes. His flight suit had the name OWENS stitched onto the right breast. He took the ticket, didn't even bat an eye at its crinkled appearance, stamped it and handed it back.

"Happy travels," he said.

Alex nodded, cast one more nervous look at the Chasers still scouring the dock, and boarded the ship.

* * *

The problem with cryo-sleep was that it was never intended for someone like Alex. In fairness, someone like Alex had never existed before, so there wasn't really a precedent.

She sighed and looked out through the Plexiglas of her cryo-chamber to the other passengers all sleeping deeply within their own pods. She had been drifting in and out of sleep for the past several weeks. She didn't know how much time was left on this journey, but she couldn't stay cooped up any longer. She pulled the release handle inside her chamber and stepped out as soon as the glass front lifted.

Alex stretched her arms above her head and looked around the dark cabin. There were around fifty occupied cryo-chambers onboard, their occupants all asleep and rocking gently as the ship sped through space. She looked at the passengers closest to her.

A man and a woman in prospector gear. An older man and three younger boys decked out in the traditional Chrislam garb. An impish young boy, maybe twelve or thirteen years old and seemingly alone. A cop with curly red-blond hair.

Alex paused in front of the chamber situated directly across from the cop. This one held a beast of a man. He was tall, heavily muscled, with tanned skin and a shaved head. His features were masculine and well-defined, and even without the chains, the blindfold, and the bit in his mouth, this man would have looked like danger incarnate. Everything about him seemed threatening, though Alex couldn't immediately identify why this was. She read the words LOCKOUT PROTOCOL: NO EARLY RELEASE on the glass front of his chamber.

She frowned as she looked at his restraints. Those cuffs and that metal bit couldn't be comfortable, even in sleep. She had had enough experience with restraints and felt a wash of sympathy for the man, even if it was obvious that he was a criminal.

She shivered as memories of her time with Dr. Farren in the Institute came unbidden to her mind. She had been little better than a prisoner there herself.

The worst part for Alex was that she also had many happy memories with the doctor. He had been wonderful to her when she was young, just like her own father. That had made his cruelty all the more painful.

It had happened shortly before her 18th birthday. Alex had noticed the doctor's tracking stare any time she was in the same room with him. He would watch her strangely, almost calculatingly. She didn't understand it, not at first.

And then one morning she had woken from a deep, sluggish sleep to find that she wasn't in her room, but strapped to a metal table, completely naked, as techs in pristine white scrubs and face masks applied a stinking, burning paste over her body from the neck down. The paste, commonly used for surgical prep and elective cosmetic procedures, permanently removed body hair, and it had felt like acid on her skin. She had screamed but no one had cared.

They rolled her into a brightly lit room and placed a needle in her arm. She woke up hours later without her womb, and only a small line of stitches to show where it had once been. Just like that, her dreams of having a family, children of her own, was stripped away from her. She cried, she begged the techs to just tell her _why_. But no one answered her and eventually she was left alone in that bright, cold room with nothing but her own tortured thoughts for company.

But this was nothing compared to what followed.

Dr. Farren and his associates had been developing a formula meant to cure all human diseases. It was to be the crowning achievement in the entire history of medicine, and now seemed possible through the use of splicing.

Found on a lonely planet in the Moori star system some twenty years previously was a funny little creature called a Krytaur. This pea-sized creature had the most complex immune system of any hitherto known species in existence, and was seemingly impervious to disease. Dr. Farren had believed that the Krytaur's DNA could be used to produce the same immune capabilities in human patients.

But that didn't prove to be the case. All of his human trials ended in the deaths of his volunteers. Horrible, painful deaths. Dr. Farren hadn't given up, and finally developed a formula that he believed would work (hormones were the key to perfecting the formula—the reason behind Alex's unwilling hysterectomy), but by that time funding for his research had been cut completely.

His ambition couldn't be stoppered. Not when he had a perfectly healthy test subject living right under his own roof.

He spliced Alex's DNA with that of the Krytaur, but the results were far from expected. Instead of simply amplifying her immune system, her DNA completely mutated. Instead of merely being able to fight off disease, her body's regenerative capabilities were magnified to astounding levels. She healed, almost instantly, from any injury. Her body could regrow entire limbs, organs, even her eyes.

Dr. Farren subjected Alex to countless excruciating experiments to test the limits of her regeneration. She was cut, torn apart, eviscerated, burned, frozen, stabbed, shot, dismembered, drowned, even submerged in a vat of acid. Each time, no matter how little was left of her, she always reformed, always healed completely.

Most astonishing, however, was the fact that her body regenerated so quickly that she stopped aging altogether. In the ten years that Alex was trapped inside the Institute, her body did not age a bit. Dr. Farren had, unknowingly, discovered the secret to immortality. The only problem was that even after ten years of testing the same formula on other subjects, experimenting on Alex herself, and even trying to turn Alex's blood into a serum of its own, her astonishing results couldn't be replicated. None of the other test subjects survived the splicing, and Dr. Farren couldn't identify what it was about Alex that had allowed her to survive in the first place. It was a mystery that she had no intention of letting him solve now.

That's why the doctor had hired a team of Chasers, sparing no expense to retrieve her. Without her, he had no hope of ever replicating the strange mutation in her DNA. Without her, his life's work was all for naught.

Alex shook her head violently, as if that could dispel the memories from her mind. She wouldn't dwell on the pain from her past; she was making a new life for herself, a better future. Although for Alex, who was seemingly incapable of dying, the future seemed far more scary and uncertain without the promise of an _end_.

She ran a hand through her short brown hair and glanced back up at the chained man, only to gasp and take an involuntary step backward.

 _He was awake._

Though he was blindfolded and his back still reclined against the seat of his cryo-chamber, it was obvious that the man was not sleeping. His head was angled slightly toward her, alertness apparent in his coiling muscles. There was no way that he could see her through the blindfold, she knew, but somehow it seemed like he was staring right at her.

No one else should have been awake.

Startled, Alex started to back away toward her own chamber when the ship suddenly lurched as if something had collided with them.

"What the hell," she muttered, straightening. Flashing red lights came on overhead accompanied by a dull alarm. The ship lurched again and she fell against the chained man's cryo-chamber.

She pushed herself up, her hands splayed on the glass, and saw the man shift ever-so-slightly within the chamber. The hairs on the nape of her neck raised.

Alex wanted to move back, to put distance between herself and the man, and lock herself back into her own cryo-chamber, but the ship continued to buck and dip and it was all she could do to hold herself upright against the prisoner's chamber. Her hands squeaked against the glass, and she nearly fell over when the ship listed severely toward the back. As she righted herself she could have sworn she saw the ghost of a smirk cross the muscled man's lips, but it was difficult to tell with the bit wedged between his teeth.

She tried again to stumble her way back to her own chamber where she might at least find a little stability, but again she was stopped, this time by the body that flew out of its cryo-chamber and directly into her.

The man's body crashed into her, smashing her back against the criminal's cryo-chamber. Her head hit the glass with a painful thwack, and a second later both the man and Alex fell onto the floor. Her chin grated against the metal floor, but the scrape healed before it could even bleed.

"I'm awake," the man said, astonished and confused. "Why am I awake?"

Alex rolled onto her side and saw it was the cop. He blinked owlishly at her for a moment before he seemed to notice the flashing red lights and the blaring alarm.

"Something's gone wrong," she said, pointing out the obvious. "There was a big jolt, like we hit something, then the alarm went off."

"How long've you been up?"

"Since just before you," she hedged. Alex wanted to believe the cop was on the straight and narrow, but she couldn't place her faith in that. There were plenty of dirty cops and politicians willing to look the other way on the Institute's payroll, otherwise they would have been shut down long ago.

The cop pushed up to his feet, wobbled a moment on his unsteady legs, and then reached out a hand to help Alex stand. His blue eyes flew up to the prisoner's cryo-chamber in alarm, but then relaxed slightly when he saw the muscular man still bound inside. Alex saw the other passengers begin to rouse in their chambers; apparently cryo-sleep had been turned off as the system prioritized energy use into other areas.

Suddenly the ship impacted with something terribly and an enormous hole ripped into the hull. The back of the passenger cabin tore away from the ship, bouncing, skittering, and crashing into the surface of the planet they had collided with. Alex squinted against the bright, burning yellow light that flooded the cabin, and just had time to grab onto the side of the closest cryo-chamber—the criminal's chamber—before she could be sucked out the back and thrown into the smoldering wreckage.

She clutched at the chamber and watched in horror as row after row of cryo-lockers were torn from the cabin, some 40-odd chambers in all, and crashed into the planet, disintegrating out of sight. 40 chambers, 40 lives, gone in an instant.

The ship continued to skid and grind against the planet's surface, but it was losing momentum. Finally it halted altogether in a jarring, crashing stop that sent everything left within the cabin to toss and topple over. Alex had to roll swiftly to the side to avoid being crushed by the prisoner's cryo-chamber when it listed and then fell forward. She heard glass shatter, but a sudden tangle of loose wires fell on top of her and it took several moments for her to pull herself out of them.

When she was standing again, the first thing Alex noticed was the thick yellow dust that permeated the air. She coughed and lifted the collar of her shirt over her nose and mouth, trying not to breath it in. It couldn't hurt her, not really, but she didn't like the sensation of it coating her throat.

The second thing Alex noticed immediately following the crash, was the sound of voices calling out in both English and what she guessed to be Arabic. She could see shifting shadows amongst the debris that had once been the passenger cabin—or part of the passenger cabin. The gaping hole in the hull revealed bright, unnaturally yellow light and what appeared to be the scorched, sun-baked surface of an unknown planet.

The third thing she noticed was the empty cryo-locker next to her. The very same locker that the hulking, blindfolded prisoner had occupied only minutes before. She couldn't help the sudden shiver that raced up her spine, but she wasn't the only person to notice the man's absence. The cop was standing next to her then, his eyes darting from the empty chamber to the jungle of debris all around them. His hand drifted to his belt, but his gun holster was alarmingly empty.

"Did you see where he went," the cop asked Alex.

She shook her head. Whoever that muscular man was, he had been as swift and silent as a predator to have escaped without either Alex or the cop noticing him.

The cop ducked away from her then, his eyes sweeping over the ground as he carefully picked his way through the fallen cryo-chambers and broken pieces of the ship. Alex followed behind him, not really worried about her safety, but concerned about what carnage might await her eyes as she ventured further into the crash.

Just up ahead she saw the light of a cutting torch as the wild-haired prospector woman tried to open a jammed cryo-chamber. As Alex approached, the plexi gave way and the impish boy she had noticed earlier rolled out from within, looking unscathed and strangely unafraid.

"I guess something went wrong, huh," the boy said.

"Understatement," Alex said, reaching down a hand to help the kid up.

"Whoa," the kid said, surveying the enormous crack in the hull. "Where the hell are we?"

"We're alive," the prospector woman said in a thick accent. "That's really all that matters at this point." The woman was looking pointedly toward the missing section of the hull where the other lockers would have been.

"A few more minutes and we all would have been sucked out," Alex said, confirming the thoughts she could read on the other woman's face. "We're the lucky ones, I guess."

"I'm not sure how this all went down, but I can be grateful for that," the woman said, and then lifted the cutting torch in her hand. "We should maybe see if anyone else needs help getting out."

Alex nodded and followed her through the mess of debris, overturned equipment, and dangling wires. It was lucky that it was daylight outside because all power seemed to have been cut within the passenger cabin, and navigating this chaos would be downright hazardous in the dark. As it was, the other survivors they encountered were already stumbling about, disoriented and coughing from the yellow dust.

Alex saw the cop reemerge from the storage deck below the cabin, pushing the recaptured prisoner ahead of him with the butt of his recovered gun. She wasn't sure what had gone down between them, but the cop was breathing heavily and there was a nasty red mark around his neck. The prisoner, who was even larger than Alex had first believed, walked casually, seemingly uncaring that he had been restrained again. The cop halted the prisoner suddenly and chained him to a nearby bulkhead. He checked the strength of the metal pillar before ripping the goggles off the prisoner's eyes and replacing it with the torn and dirtied blindfold. He went to place the bit back into the man's mouth when Alex approached.

She wasn't sure why she did it, but she asked, "Is that really necessary? Is he going to chew his way through the bulkhead?"

The cop whirled to face her. His expression was annoyed at first, but as he looked her up and down, the look softened to something unfamiliar that made her stomach squirm. "With Riddick every precaution is necessary." He pulled the bit tight, making the man, Riddick, appear to be grimacing.

"It just seems inhumane," Alex persisted. She noticed Riddick cock his head slightly at the sound of her voice.

"The words 'Riddick' and 'humane' don't belong in the same sentence," the cop said. He came to stand before her. "Name's Johns."

"Alex," she said in return, and turned away from the man chained to the bulkhead. She indicated the prospector woman that was now helping one of the young Chrislams out of an overturned chamber. "We're looking around for any other survivors that might be trapped in the rubble."

Johns nodded and wandered off in the opposite direction. "I'll check the front, see if any crewies survived. Might be able to get some answers about this shit storm we're in."

Alex watched him go and tried not to look back toward Riddick.

* * *

When the man impaled to the seat began to scream, Alex fled the cabin. She had recognized him as the smiling man that had taken her ticket and wished her happy travels all those weeks ago. His raw suffering had been too much to bear and she had needed to escape.

Outside she was momentarily blinded by light. It was much brighter than she had been expecting, and she wished suddenly for the sunglasses she had packed away in her bag. She would need to go searching for her bag soon anyway. It should be tucked away somewhere below the passenger cabin. She hadn't brought enough stuff to warrant a storage container of her own.

She blinked as her eyes adjusted, much more quickly than any normal human's would have, and she looked up to see exactly why the light was so bright. Instead of a single burning sun in the sky, there were two. One blazing yellow, the other orange.

The other survivors filed out behind her, all cursing as they shielded their eyes. The sound of the man's screams could still be heard from within, and Alex wrapped her arms around herself, trying to block out the noise.

"It's a might bright out here," the prospector woman said, coming up on Alex's side. Alex noticed for the first time that the woman was both beautiful, in that strange wild way, and seemed to radiate confidence and strength. The woman held out a hand. "Shazza. This is Zeke." She indicated the dark-skinned man on her other side. This man had wide, untamed eyes, and seemed to have some aboriginal blood. He nodded, but didn't smile.

"Alex," she said, shaking Shazza's hand. The other survivors moved forward then, introducing themselves to the group in turn.

There was the boy—Jack—that Shazza had saved from the jammed locker. The older Chrislam man, Imam, and his three acolytes, Hassan, Suleiman, and the youngest, Ali. A paunchy man with a pretentious air about him who introduced himself as Paris P. Ogilvie. Johns the cop. And finally Carolyn Fry, the captain of the ship who wandered out only after the screams from within had ceased.

After the introductions everyone gathered around Fry, giving thanks for her handling of the crash. They all believed their survival was entirely dependent on her skills as a pilot. Fry seemed uncomfortable with their gratitude, but took it in silence.

The Chrislams all fell to their knees, each facing a different direction since they had no way of knowing where New Mecca lay, and began to pray.

Johns was fiddling with his compass, but the needle kept spinning rudderlessly. He snapped it closed and turned to Fry. "We had thought to form a search party to find other survivors, but then we saw this." He indicated the burning trench the ship had carved into the planet's surface and the smoldering wreckage jutting up from the ground for what looked like a mile, at least, behind them.

"Little chance anyone could walk away from that," Shazza said.

Alex shifted uncomfortably. She would have survived that, but no one knew about her abnormal abilities, and she wanted to keep it that way. Keeping a low profile was her best strategy for freedom, and revealing that she was pretty much immune to dying in any capacity was the exact opposite of low profile.

"Anyone having trouble breathing? Aside from me?" Paris wheezed.

"Like I just ran, or something," Jack agreed.

"Feel one lung short, all of us," Shazza said.

"Of course I tend toward the asthmatic. And with all this dust. . . " Paris waved a hand, indicating the yellow dust swirling in the air.

Alex frowned. She wasn't having any trouble breathing. Right after the crash she had been a little out of breath, but she had chalked that up to left over adrenaline. Perhaps she had already acclimated to the planet's environment. That seemed to make sense, especially considering she was also the only person that wasn't pouring sweat already, despite the fact that she was wearing long sleeves and a hooded jacket. Her internal temperature must have adjusted already.

"What the bloody hell happened anyways?" Zeke said.

Fry considered him a moment before saying, "Something knocked us off-lane. Maybe a rogue comet. Maybe we'll never know. Auto-pilot didn't have the authority to adjust for something like that, so it just kept us on path until the collision."

"Well, I for one, am thoroughly fucking grateful. This beast wasn't made to land like this. But cripes, you rode it down." Shazza gestured to the others. "Only reason we're alive is because of you."

Fry looked uncomfortable again.

"So, is someone coming for us? Or are we all just going to die of exposure or dehydration or sunstroke or maybe something even worse?" Jack looked around at everyone's shocked and perturbed expressions. "You don't have to worry about scaring me or anything."

"You're the one scaring us," Alex said with a smile. "You're pretty morbid, huh?"

Jack grinned back, seeming to think 'morbid' was a compliment. "Yeah, but it could be a long time before someone finds us here. What about food until then? Will we have to resort to cannibalism to survive?"

"We'll start with him," Alex whispered conspiratorially, pointing discreetly at Paris, who was dabbing sweat from his brow with a silk handkerchief. Jack laughed.

"Some rather pressing concerns do come to mind," Paris said.

"What's our next step?" Alex asked Fry. She had no way of telling the time, or whether the sun was waxing or waning in the sky, but she figured it would probably be in everyone's best interest to gather supplies and secure shelter before nightfall. Deserts were frigidly cold at night, after all.

"We need water, food," Shazza said.

" _Oxygen_ ," Paris said.

"Be nice if we could get this ship back up and running. Or at least enough to send out a distress beacon," Johns said.

Alex shifted from foot to foot. Logically she knew that figuring out a way to find rescue was their best chance for getting off this planet, but she also knew that by this time Dr. Farren was sure to have placed a bounty on her head, which meant she would have both Chasers _and_ mercs after her. If they had been knocked very far off the shipping lane then the chances of being rescued by anyone but mercs was very slim. She might be able to heal from any injury, but Alex was no fighter. It wouldn't take much effort for someone to restrain her.

"We'll deal with one problem at a time," Fry said, her voice ringing with authority. "There are pressure suits inside the main cabin. I saw the locker was still intact when I passed through. The suits have liquid oxygen canisters inside. Everyone, start ripping them out. Use sparingly; we have no idea how long we'll be here or how long it will take to acclimate, so we need them to last."

"Leave it to us," Shazza said, indicating herself and Zeke. "We'll make some adjustments. Try to get them modified for quick hits instead of extended release." Zeke nodded and the two of them turned and headed back into the ship.

"Great. Now, we need water more than we need food. The ship had a store, but with the crash there's no way to know whether the water has been contaminated. I need as many people searching the wreckage, containers and all, for anything we can drink. Food is our next priority. I'm going to check the ship's water supply now."

"I'll help you with that," Alex said. "If I can find my bag, I had some bottled water and food bars inside. It's not much." She shrugged.

"Any little bit helps," Fry said, nodding appreciatively before turning to the others. "Start checking the containers first. Any spare supplies would have been stored in those."

The other survivors, except for Johns, turned and filed off toward the large metal cargo hold that had partially embedded into the ground upon impact. Fry headed toward the ship with Alex on her heels and Johns only a few steps behind. She wasn't sure why, but Alex didn't like having the cop behind her. She had a paranoid suspicion that his eyes were on her, following her movement.

Fry stopped inside the main cabin and jutted her chin toward the spot where Riddick was secured to the bulkhead. "What about him?"

"Big evil?" Johns came up on Alex's right side, standing close enough for his arm to brush against her shoulder.

"Are we supposed to just keep him locked up forever?" Fry cast an annoyed look to Johns.

"Be my choice," Johns answered, seeming not to notice Fry's disapproving look or Alex moving to put more space between them. "Already escaped once from the max slam facility on—"

"I don't need his life story," Fry said.

"Is he really that dangerous," Alex asked. She was intrigued despite herself. It wasn't everyday that you met someone that could resist the pull of cryo-sleep. He had been awake and aware of her staring at him before the crash, and Alex couldn't help but be curious about him.

"Only around humans." Johns smirked at her.

Alex frowned and stared at Riddick. He wasn't paying his audience any attention. Rather, he had his head turned toward the bulkhead, his mouth on the metal. For an absurd moment Alex thought he really _was_ trying to chew his way through the bit and the bulkhead.

She stepped closer to the prisoner. "What are you doing?" She didn't realize she had addressed the question to Riddick himself until he turned his head toward her. She caught a flash of silver through a rip in his blindfold. His lips were wet around the bit and a drop of water dripped from his chin.

 _Water_.

"Oh, shit," Fry said.

Suddenly Fry, Johns, and Alex were running. Johns snatched up an emergency light. They dodged dangling wires, jumped over broken cryo-chambers, and skidded around fallen debris until they reached a set of rungs bolted into the side of the hull. They scaled them quickly, Johns leading with the light and Alex bringing up the rear.

They crawled through the dusty, dank superstructure to reach the ship's water cistern. Johns handed back the light and wrenched open the crank-hatch.

Their faces all fell. Fry lowered the light; they didn't need it. There were gaping holes in the side of the cistern, sunlight shafting inside the near empty tank in dusty wedges.

"We lost all the water," Fry said. "There would have been enough to sustain us for a few months, if we were careful."

"Just mud at the bottom," Johns said, staring down the cistern's interior. "This damn dust."

"We'll figure something out," Alex said, feeling the strange need to comfort Fry. She wasn't sure if she believed her own words or not.

* * *

The cargo hold sat apart from the main body of the ship. Alex, Fry, and Johns made their way inside, following the echo of voices through the dark corridor lined with access doors to containers.

They found the others cramped inside a particularly full container. There were Tiffany chairs stacked to the ceiling, bronze eagle lecterns, oriental umbrellas, Neo-Egyptian castings, paintings in gilt frames, a Wooten desk, and one enormous gold sarcophagus. It was around the latter that everyone was gathered.

Johns whistled. "King Tut's tomb. . ." No one was sure whether he was being sarcastic or not.

Paris sniffed. "You'd be surprised what all of this will fetch in the Taurus system."

Johns swayed suddenly, and a slightly sick look came over his face. Alex reached out a hand to help steady him. He nodded at her brusquely and pulled back.

"You okay," she asked.

He waved her off. "Little swamp flu from the Conga system. Never shook it with all the cryo-sleep." He stepped toward the sarcophagus and looked inside it. "What have we here?"

Alex followed and saw that the entire sarcophagus was filled with bottles of alcohol.

"Sherry. Vintage Port. Glenfiddich. Bicardi 151," Paris said proudly.

"Booze," Fry said incredulously. "That's what you have to drink? There was nothing else?"

"We can keep checking," Jack said. "But no luck so far."

"Booze?" Paris looked affronted. "200-year-old single-malt scotch is to 'booze' as foie gras is to 'duck guts'."

Johns snapped the cap on a bottle of amber liquid. "I'll toast to that."

"I'll need a receipt for that," Paris said hurriedly. "For all of these."

"Top of my list," Fry said with an eyeroll.

Alex lifted a dusty bottle of vodka from the sarcophagus and frowned as she rolled it in her hands. She wasn't actually thirsty yet, and didn't have to worry about dehydrating to death. If she went long enough without water it would become uncomfortable, and she would steadily become weaker, but she wouldn't die. The same could not be said for the others. They had maybe a week before dehydration would set in. Less if they consumed all this alcohol.

"I don't suppose you can drink this."

Fry's voice snapped Alex's attention away from the bottle in her hand. She looked up to see Imam and his acolytes standing in the doorway. The younger Chrislams watched everyone drinking with something like envy on their faces.

"One of the Christian habits we did not adopt, I'm afraid. We'll simply have to wait," Imam said.

"Wait for what?" Johns took a long swig from the bottle. "There's no water. You understand that, don't you?"

Imam smiled and shook his head. "All deserts have water, somewhere. God shall lead us there."

Johns and Fry both snorted at this.

"You better hope he's right," Alex said to them. "If we don't find water then everyone _will_ die. All of this alcohol is actually less than useful to us. It might wet your tongue, but it's only going to dehydrate you faster."

Paris didn't seem to like her 'less than useful' comment. He twirled on the spot and stalked out of the container, muttering something about boorish ingrates.

Alex placed the vodka back into the sarcophagus. She ran her hand through her hair and sighed. "I'm going to look for my bag."

She walked out of the cargo hold and headed back to the ship. When she entered the main cabin, she knew immediately that something was wrong.

Alex cast her eyes around the wreckage, but she couldn't see anything amiss. It slowly dawned on her that it wasn't what she was seeing that was wrong; it was what she _wasn't_ seeing. Or rather _who_ she wasn't seeing.

At the base of the bulkhead laid a cutting torch and a mangled scrap of metal that might have once been a pair of handcuffs.

Riddick had escaped. _Again_.

* * *

 **A/N:** There it is, the first chapter of the newly rewritten Fear the Dark. The next chapter will include a one-on-one Riddick x Alex interaction, and some more slight deviation from the movie sequence.

Also, I know that this chapter probably raises some questions about Alex's past and the things done to her. Please be patient. Most of these questions will probably be answered in future chapters as more of her past is revealed.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** Sincere thanks to everyone that added Fear the Dark to their alerts and/or favorites. Big thanks to cassandraOH and Saskatoon for your thoughtful reviews! I hope everyone enjoys the second chapter.

* * *

 **Chapter Two: The Convict**

* * *

After Johns confirmed that Riddick was truly missing from the wreckage, the survivors flew into action gathering up whatever weapons they could find in the cargo hold. They pillaged storage lockers, hauling any promising items back to the navigation bay of the ship.

They dumped the weapons onto a broken control panel and took stock. Johns had his pistol, a shotgun, and a baton. Zeke offered up a hunting boomerang. Shazza had a pickax and a satchel filled with well-worn digging tools. Jack had found some long, particularly sharp shards of glass and wrapped strips of cloth around the bases of each to make shivs. Imam pulled a ceremonial blade from his robes. Alex had found a broken piece of the ship's hull that could be hefted like a club.

Paris lumbered into the nav bay laden down with antiques.

"What the hell is all that?" Johns gave the items a critical look.

Paris laid his precious curios down carefully. He pointed a finger at several scythe-like blades and said, "Maratha crow-bill war-picks from Northern India. Very rare." Alex lifted one up. It felt heavy and awkward in her hands, and the shaft was longer than she was tall, although at 5'1" many things were taller than Alex. Still, they were definitely not her weapons of choice.

"And this," Zeke said, picking up a long, thin tube. He looked perplexed and a bit disgusted.

"Blow-dart hunting stick from Papua New Guinea. Very, very rare, as the tribe is now extinct." Paris carefully retrieved the hunting stick from Zeke and laid it almost lovingly upon the control panel.

"Cuz' they couldn't hunt shit with these things, be my guess," Zeke said. Alex snickered behind her hand and Zeke gave her a quick, small grin.

Paris huffed. "Well, what's the need, anyway? If he's gone, he's gone. Why should he bother us?"

"Maybe to take what you got," Johns said in a low voice as he strapped his baton and pistol back onto his belt. He turned to the group slowly, letting his words sink in. "Maybe to work your nerves. Or maybe he'll just come back and skull-fuck you in your sleep." He looked unnervingly toward Alex as he said that last part. She felt like he was saying this as a way to curb any future objections she might have about the way he treated his prisoners. She averted her eyes; point taken.

"Sounds like a charmer," Shazza said sarcastically, but everyone reached for the weapons without hesitation.

Alex decided to pocket one of Jack's impromptu shivs, giving the boy a wink as she did so. Jack smiled back at her proudly.

* * *

Zeke and Shazza had managed to modify the breather units by adding straps, rubber tubing, and ball floats. They tested the prototype on Jack, who gave them the thumbs up and a smile around the mouthpiece when the unit supplied him oxygen on demand instead of in a constant flow.

The breather units were finished just in time for the scouting party to set off in search of water—or wayward prisoners, in Johns' case.

Alex had just finished helping Fry wrap Owens' body in a sheet they had recovered from the cargo hold. Fry had seemed hesitant to accept her help at first, but Alex had pointed out that the two of them could finish faster than Fry could on her own, and the scouting party would be setting out soon. Shazza approached them, two breather units slung over her shoulders.

"I'll help you into one," Shazza told Alex, hefting a breather unit toward her.

Alex hesitated. She didn't need the unit, and if she took one it would only be to divert attention away from herself. She didn't want anyone to cotton on to the fact that she was different, but at the same time, it didn't seem to right to take the unit when someone else actually needed it.

"No thanks," Alex said. "I used to live near the mountains. Higher altitude, less oxygen, you know? I think I'm actually starting to acclimate." She shrugged like it was no big deal.

Shazza and Fry both blinked at her in surprise, but Shazza pulled the breather unit back. "Alright. That must have been a very high altitude. I feel like I'm breathing through a straw."

"Yeah," Alex laughed nervously. "I guess I have strong lungs."

"If you change your mind…" Shazza trailed off as she turned and offered the unit to Fry instead. The blond woman took it without hesitation.

Alex sighed and dusted her hands off. Just a few yards away the Chrislams were busy wrapping their heads in traditional Bedouin headgear, readying themselves for travel. Though it had cooled down considerably from when they first crashed, everyone but Alex was soaked in sweat.

No one seemed to notice that she wasn't pouring sweat, though. Perhaps it was because she had shed her jacket, opened the first two and the very bottom buttons of her plaid shirt, and ripped off the sleeves. She had also rolled her pants up to just below her knees, but that was more to keep the dust off. She still needed to find her bag; inside she had spare clothes and a fleece blanket. She was already dreading their first night in the desert.

On the horizon the yellow sun was sinking low, and the orangish-red one looked like it was following close behind. Alex absently wondered how many moons this planet had.

"Imam," Fry said, approaching the older Chrislam man. "We should leave soon. Before nightfall, but while it's cooler."

"What, you're going off, too?" Zeke said to Fry while he impatiently helped Paris adjust the straps of a breathing unit.

"Yeah. Johns said he'd leave you a gun. But can you do me a favor? Get my crewies buried? They were good guys and they died bad," Fry said.

Shazza placed a hand on Fry's shoulder and nodded. "Of course we will."

"What's that commotion," Alex asked, pointing toward two of the young Chrislam pilgrims. They were running around the side of the ship, yelling excitedly.

Everyone took off in their direction, rounding the side of the ship to see something completely unexpected.

Another sun, this one blue, rising on the opposite horizon. Two setting suns, and one blossoming into the sky.

"Whoa," Jack said, coming up on Alex's side. "Three suns? This planet is crazy."

"It's sort of a relief," Alex said. "Makes it easier to look for water. Gives us better visibility."

"Also makes us sweat more, dehydrate faster," Shazza said.

"Guess that's it for your nightfall," Zeke said to Fry.

"That's it for my cocktail hour," Paris complained.

Imam placed his hand on one of the young pilgrim's shoulders and smiled at the group. "We take this to be a good sign. Blue sun, blue water. It is a path, a direction from Allah."

Johns jumped down from the top of the ship, landing on his feet in a cat-like move that Alex couldn't help but admire; she would never be that agile. "It's a very good sign. That's Riddick direction. You do _not_ want to be caught in the dark with that guy."

"But you found his tracks over there," Alex said, pointing in the opposite direction.

"Toward sunset," Fry said.

Johns nodded at them. "Which means he went toward sunrise." He pulled the pistol from his belt and handed it to Zeke after showing him how to work the firing mechanism. "If you spot him, don't hesitate to let off a shot."

"What if Mr. Riddick spots us first?" Paris looked at the gun in Zeke's hand with trepidation.

Johns smirked. "Then there will be no shots."

* * *

The scouting party consisted of Johns, Fry, Imam, and his three pilgrim acolytes. They headed toward the shining blue sun, with Johns at the lead with his shotgun, Fry carrying one of Paris' war-picks at the back, and Imam and the younger Chrislams in the middle. Even when they had almost disappeared on the edge of the horizon, Alex could still hear the echo of the pilgrims' chants as they recited passages from the Koran.

After the scouting party headed out, the remaining survivors quickly set about their own tasks around the ship.

Zeke began dragging the wrapped bodies of the dead crewies away from the wreckage to the designated burial spot. Shazza and Jack headed toward the cargo-hold, torch in hand, to search for anymore usable goods. Paris set up a chair to keep watch from the top of the ship and fiddled with his umbrellas.

Alex headed back into the ship, intent on finding her bag. She knew it should be somewhere beneath the passenger cabin, but she hadn't yet ventured below deck and had no idea what to expect down there.

She picked up the emergency light that Johns had used to check the water cistern and found the ladder leading down into the darkness below the cabin. She turned the light on and fixed it to the belt loop of her pants. Alex climbed slowly down the metal rungs, and even with the emergency light, she had trouble seeing anything more than a few feet to any side.

The bottom rungs of the ladder were missing and Alex had to jump down to the metal floor below. She landed awkwardly, but managed not to fall.

She unhooked the light from her pants and lifted it in front of her, trying to penetrate the near blackness. Everything below deck had shifted and fallen over in the crash. Tall storage racks were listed on their sides, metal lockers thrown open, the contents inside spilled out everywhere. Almost everything looked broken or torn apart. There were shredded thermal suits and blankets, spilled dry food packets, spare repair parts rolling loose on the ground, and everywhere hanging wires and jutting pieces of broken metal.

Alex picked her way carefully through the mess, running her light slowly over everything as she approached the overturned shelf where she had stored her bag so many weeks ago. The shelf itself had remained mostly intact, but the lockers had almost all blown open, and most were empty now. Her own bag was missing from its locker and she spent several minutes shifting through the debris nearby before she spotted a familiar nylon strap. She pulled the bright orange bag from where it was lodged under another downed shelving unit, struggling to get it loose. It finally popped out, and she fell backward onto the shelf behind her. Her shoulder slammed painfully into an open locker door, and something stabbed into the back of her knee.

Alex cursed and stood up. She reached behind and pulled a sharp metal shaving from the back of her leg. The wound closed up quickly and she turned back to her bag. She set the light down on the shelf and used its illumination to inspect the outside of the bag.

The zipper had broken off, but other than that, it seemed to be intact. She ripped it open and began rummaging around inside. There were four 1 liter bottles of water, an unopened box of food bars, some t-shirts that were actually too large for her, a pair of cargo pants (the very same ones that had contained the ticket for the Hunter Gratzner), a pair of stretchy, skin-tight shorts, the fleece blanket, some spare socks rolled up into little balls, a box of matches, a couple boxes of bar soap, a fork and dull knife, and a small wad of cash that she had managed to beg off of some travelers at the docking port before she had spotted the Chasers. These things were all she had, and while it wasn't much, she felt relieved to have it back in her possession.

"Can't decide if it's stupid or brave, you being down here all alone like this. There's a crazed killer on the loose, or hadn't you heard," a voice said from somewhere behind her in the darkness. The voice was deep, scratchy, and sent a shiver racing immediately up Alex's spine. She hadn't heard this voice before, and knew at once whom it must belong to.

Alex whipped around, her eyes searching the blackness in vain. She couldn't see anything beyond the dim illumination from the emergency light. Her fingers traced the outline of the glass shiv in her pocket, but she didn't reach for it. She was curious about what the convict wanted. If he were as bad as Johns said, wouldn't he have just attacked her already? Why did he make his presence known?

"I did hear something like that," she said, and her voice sounded more nonchalant than she could have hoped for. "I'm just not the type to fall for exaggerated ghost stories."

"Brave, then," the voice said. A figure emerged from the darkness, a great, hulking shadow that seemed to flicker just at the edge of the light.

"Riddick," she acknowledged.

"Alex," he said back. "What's that short for?"

She was shocked. She hadn't expected him to know her name at all. "Alexis."

"Pretty name. Suits you."

It sounded like he was flirting with her; she didn't think she was imagining his eyes on her, looking her up and down, though it was impossible to know for sure in the darkness.

Alex felt dumbfounded. Wasn't he supposed to be some hardened criminal? Wasn't he supposed to slit her throat on sight? Hadn't Johns just told Zeke to shoot this man without hesitation?

So why was he talking to her so casually? It was almost like he was just a normal man talking to a normal woman. But neither of them was normal.

"Why are you here, Riddick?"

The huge shadow shrugged. "Curious."

"About what?"

Something flashed, his eyes maybe. "You."

Alex shifted. She knew she was an attractive girl, albeit quite small and young looking. She had fair, clear skin, big green eyes ringed in long dark lashes, slightly arched eyebrows, chestnut brown hair that gleamed with copper and gold undertones, a small nose, and pink Cupid's bow lips. She was physically small. She had never had much in the form of womanly curves, but her body was slender and willowy, and looked graceful even if she wasn't.

She had a fairly healthy perception of her body, but she wasn't used to being appraised like this. She had never been looked at so intensely before. It set her nerves on edge, and she couldn't tell if the squiggling feeling in her gut was good or not. She had no idea what she could have done to spark Riddick's interest in her.

"Why?" She couldn't stop herself from asking the question. While she was a pretty girl, she had a feeling that it wasn't her looks that had caused Riddick to risk his personal well being to come and talk to her. Well, not _just_ her looks. From the strange silver flashes she kept catching, she guessed he was still eyeing her body. Her stomach wriggled at the thought.

Riddick took another step closer. The light caught at his form, and Alex could finally see him. Shadows played over his face, but she could see his flashing eyes as they slowly swept up from her feet to meet her own.

"You woke from cryo before the crash. I want to know how," he said.

Alex swallowed. "I'm not sure." This wasn't a lie, per se. She _didn't_ know the science behind cryo-sleep and why it didn't work the way it was supposed to on immortal travelers with heightened regenerative abilities like herself.

"Your theory," he pressed.

She ran a hand through her short, choppy hair. "Well, I have a pretty kick-ass immune system. Maybe my body is just better at fighting cryo's effects than other people. Or maybe my pod had a glitch. I don't know." There. Partial truth with just a touch of uncertainty for good measure.

"Hmm." It was impossible to tell whether Riddick believed her or not.

"Why were you awake?" It seemed like a good idea to divert attention from herself, and this was something she had been wondering anyway.

"Everything shuts down in cryo-sleep," Riddick said lazily. "All but the primitive side, the animal side. My animal side just happens to be dominant."

Alex couldn't help but shiver at these words. For the first time since their conversation had started, she realized just how dangerous this man was, and that realization hit her like a hard fist to the gut. He was so much physically stronger than she was, so much larger. Even if he couldn't kill her, he could definitely hurt her. In fact, she didn't think there was much she could do to stop him if he decided to attack her. She would be all but helpless against him. Her fingers traced the outline of the shiv again.

"Oh," was all she said in response. She could feel that her eyes had gone wide and fought hard against the sudden urge to step back from his looming form.

He grinned suddenly. "Don't go getting scared on me now. I admire ballsy women. Besides, if I wanted to hurt you I would have done it already."

She swallowed, but nodded. "I certainly gave you plenty of opportunity." He was right, though. He could easily harm her, true, but he hadn't done anything more than talk. He hadn't even come close enough to touch her.

"While I have you alone," he said, still grinning, "I have one more question."

She cocked her head to the side. What more could he possibly want to know about her? As far as she knew, she had been little more than a passing curiosity to him.

"Most people see Johns, his shiny badge, his uniform, and leave him to do what he wants with his convicts, but you didn't. You questioned him, what he was doing. Why'd you do that?" His eyes burned like molten silver.

"It just seemed barbaric. The bit. The blindfold." She gestured at her mouth and eyes as she said this. "I don't think anyone deserves to be treated that way. I guess I'm just sensitive about stuff like that."

He studied her a moment. She fidgeted under his scrutiny, afraid he would ask her more probing questions. Instead he just said, "Interesting."

What he found 'interesting', however, she would have to wait to find out, because at that moment a sound rang out from the near distance. It was muffled since they were below the main cabin, but unmistakable.

"A gunshot," Alex gasped.

"Guess someone got trigger happy," Riddick said, vanishing back into the darkness as silently as a shadow.

Alex stood there a moment longer, part of her terrified to face the aftermath of that gunshot, the other part afraid that she would encounter Riddick again in the dark. Eventually she made herself gather her bag up and move.

She saw no sign of Riddick again, but when she found the others she realized she was right to want to avoid the scene that met her eyes.

* * *

"I thought it was him, that ratbag murderer," Zeke said, pulling his fingers through his short hair as he explained what happened to Alex. Jack, Shazza, and Paris all wore similar expressions of horror and disgust as they wrapped the newly dead body in a dusty sheet for burial. Zeke looked shaken and a little sick, and maybe even a bit belligerent.

Alex looked at the mummy-wrapped corpse and winced. Another survivor had wandered up looking for help, looking for salvation, and had gotten a bullet in the head. All because Zeke had thought it was Riddick, and Johns had said quite clearly not to hesitate to shoot the convict on sight.

Alex felt a surge of guilt in her gut. She hadn't told the others about her meeting with Riddick. She imagined they wouldn't have taken it well before Zeke shot the unknown survivor, but especially not now. She wouldn't blame them either.

She couldn't help but feel like if she had been here instead of with Riddick that she might have been able to do something. Maybe she could have saved the man, stopped Zeke from pulling the trigger. Maybe not, but now she would never know. All because she had been conversing with a killer. It's strange how easy it had been for her to forget that Riddick was, in fact, a murderer.

Zeke rolled the body onto a makeshift sled and started to pull it toward the burial site. He huffed with the effort and Alex rushed to his side. She grabbed the other end of the rope handle and began to tug.

"I'll help you," she said when Zeke looked at her in question. He didn't thank her, but he didn't need to.

When they reached the burial site Zeke pulled back the sun-tarp that hid the small ditch from sight and Alex rolled the body inside. It might not have been the most respectable way to treat a body, but it was heavy and neither of them was able to carry it down. Zeke was breathing too hard and taking hits off his unit, and Alex simply lacked the physical strength.

They slid into the grave where the bodies all laid and set about arranging them. It would be a tight squeeze now that another had been added to the grave, but Alex was sure they could fit them all without having to stack any. It felt strange to think so callously about human bodies, but she hadn't known these people, didn't even know their names.

"Hey, there's something here," Zeke called suddenly.

Alex turned to see the small hole that he was indicating. It seemed to open into a tunnel, or maybe a little cave, it was difficult to tell. "It looks like a burrow, or maybe a fox den."

Zeke looked around at the barren landscape. "The hell kind of animal could live here?"

"Maybe a reptile? There are countless species of lizards and snakes that live in deserts," she said. "A lot of them live underground and only venture outside to hunt and regulate their body temperature."

"That's real fascinating," Zeke mumbled. He crouched down on his knees, flicked on a small flashlight and peered into the hole. A strange clicking noise suddenly rang out from within. "There's something in there…" he started, but never got the chance to finish.

Zeke yelled, his body convulsing, as he fought furiously against something. Gunshots rang out from within the hole, and a spray of blood hit the dirt all around his torso as something began to drag him, still kicking and screaming, into the dark passage.

Alex dove for his feet, latching onto his boots and trying with all her might to pull him back out. Her feet slid in the dirt. She wasn't able to brace herself and soon Zeke's body disappeared entirely, his boots slipped from her hands and off his feet and fell to the dirt. Her own foot slid partially inside the hole as well, and before she could pull it back out, something slashed at her ankle.

White-hot pain lanced up her leg. Something stabbed into her calf and began to yank her further into the passage. Alex yelled out in pain and surprise. She turned on her stomach and scrabbled at the ground, trying desperately to get away from whatever had ahold of her.

She was sliding deeper into the hole, the cutting, ripping pain moving further up her leg. Her wounds were healing, but new ones kept taking their place. Whatever creature this was that had her was bad news, and even if she would survive this, it seemed like it would only be after enduring terrible agony.

"Help," she screamed. "Somebody help!"

Her fingers left raking gouges in the dirt as she was dragged by something far stronger than herself.

Just when Alex was beginning to give up hope, just when she thought she would have to let whatever this was take her, eat at her a while, and then make her escape, a strong arm banded around her chest, the other latching onto her injured leg. Someone pulled her forcibly from the hole. She felt the skin and muscles of her leg _rip_ and couldn't hold in her whimper of pain, even as the wound started to heal. Her back was pulled flush against a massive, warm chest as her savior pulled her out of the grave.

She was turned on her back and laid gently on the ground. She opened her eyes—she hadn't even realized she'd closed them—and saw Riddick poised above her. He was leaning over her, one knee between her legs, a hand braced by her head. A shiv still dangled from his other hand as he looked her over. She trembled beneath him, relieved, but still reeling in shock and terror.

Suddenly the sun-tarp over the grave was ripped back and Shazza stood there, staring between the bloody smears in the grave, the boots that had been torn off Zeke's feet, and Alex—bloodied and shaking—lying beneath Riddick.

Riddick stood then and took off running toward the large earthen spires that grew up out of the ground nearby. Shazza started after him, pausing only long enough to ask Alex if she was alright. Alex couldn't do any more than nod her head, still crippled with shock as she was, but Shazza seemed content with this answer and disappeared the way Riddick had gone.

Alex shuddered and pulled her arms around herself where she still lay in the dirt. Her leg had healed, but in her mind she could still hear Zeke's screams and that strange clicking noise. She didn't think she would ever be able to forget those sounds, or the feel of Zeke's legs convulsing as something ripped and slashed at him, or the way his blood had smelled. There had been so much blood, his and her own.

She heard the sound of a scuffle nearby. Shazza's enraged screams. Fry's panicked voice.

There was a grunting noise next as someone dragged something heavy through the dirt. Footsteps were getting closer.

Alex finally pulled herself up and to her feet. She avoided looking into the grave or at the people approaching from behind, and made her way slowly back to the ship. She made it inside the main cabin before the first sob tore out of her throat.

* * *

 **A/N:** There it is, chapter two! The further the story goes, the more I will start to deviate from the original plot. Some people will still die as they did in the film, but perhaps some people might survive? Stay tuned to see how different things might have been. . . and please let me know what you think. :)


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N:** Here is Chapter 3. You'll notice some dialogue straight from the movie here, but also quite a bit of original content. This chapter deals mostly with the aftermath of Zeke's death. Already, Alex's presence in the story is changing the plot.

Thank you very much to everyone that has favorited/followed Fear the Dark. And thank you to the following reviewers: decadenceofmysoul, colorfulimagination123, Saskatoon, TheRedBones, cassandraOH, ChErRyFaLlS, crimsonbloodmoon1, Anon, Carolina.H.S., and to the person that signed it under 'guest'. Your reviews are very much appreciated!

* * *

 **Chapter Three: The Aftermath**

* * *

Alex ended up in the nav bay where it was cooler and darker and emptier than the main cabin. She curled up beneath the control panel and just let herself cry. She cried for Zeke, who had died horribly, painfully. She cried for herself, for the memories that she knew would haunt her, and for the terror that she had felt all the way down to her bones. She cried because she had, like so many times in her past, been completely helpless to stop what had happened. She cried because she hadn't been strong enough to save Zeke or herself. And she cried because if not for Riddick she would have been dragged into that hole, ripped apart, maybe over and over again before she could get away.

Eventually her sobs died down, and the lingering terror abated. The pain and horror of having Zeke's convulsing body literally ripped from her grasp still lingered, but she found that she was slowly able to think around the trauma. Whatever was in that hole needed to be avoided at all cost. But there was still the problem of the open grave. She didn't want to risk whatever that was crawling out and attacking anyone else. The grave would need to be filled.

Alex wiped her still slightly wet eyes on the back of her hand and rose from her spot beneath the control panel. It wouldn't do to waste more time.

She emerged in the main cabin and saw something that made her pause. Riddick. Chained again with both arms spread uncomfortably wide. His eyes were closed, and his head hung in a way that would probably convince anyone else that he was asleep or unconscious. But somehow Alex knew better.

She took a step toward him, meaning to speak to him, intent on thanking him for saving her life, when the murmur of voices from outside the ship stopped her cold.

"…barely anything to see…just a smear of blood…"

"…just leave the murdering bastard on this hellhole…"

Alex bypassed Riddick, following the voices toward the group of survivors assembled outside the ship. She approached them just as Fry took the shiv from Johns' hands and turned it over, inspecting it.

"He used this," Fry asked.

"Sir Shiv-a-lot. He likes to cut." Johns looked darkly amused as he said this.

"Then why isn't it covered in blood?" Fry held it up so everyone could see. The blade was spotless.

"I assume he licked it clean," Johns answered.

"Then where's the body?" Fry wouldn't let up.

Johns was becoming visibly annoyed. He shifted his footing, his hands going to his hips as he looked down on the blond pilot. "He probably dragged it off and stuffed it in some hole. What does it matter? We know who's responsible."

"It wasn't Riddick," Alex said softly.

Everyone turned and stared at her in surprise. She went to stand by Fry, whose skepticism made Alex feel slightly more comfortable. Johns eyed her beadily.

"What do you mean? I saw him. He had you pinned to the ground with a shiv in his hand," Shazza said, a bit hysterically. Her eyes were wide, bloodshot.

Alex shook her head. "You misunderstood. He wasn't threatening me; he saved me."

Johns scoffed. "You must have hit your head, or the heat is making you delirious. Riddick isn't the saving type; he's the shiving type."

"Fear can alter one's perception of reality," Paris said. "And Mr. Riddick certainly inspires fear."

Everyone looked at Alex skeptically then, as if they all questioned her sanity. Even Jack seemed a bit dubious. She wasn't sure what she could do to make them believe her, to instill in them the same urgency to secure the gravesite, and to ensure that they didn't make any drastic decisions regarding Riddick.

"You say he saved you. Saved you from what?" Fry looked hard at Alex.

"I don't know what it was, but it got Zeke and nearly got me," she answered. "The only reason I didn't get dragged into that hole as well is because Riddick pulled me out."

"And why would he do that? Why would a stab-happy, murdering piece of shit risk his neck to save some girl he never met?" Johns stepped toward Alex, his posture near threatening. She shrank back from him involuntarily, and he looked around at the others. "All the evidence points to Riddick."

"What evidence," Alex asked. "You don't have the body. The so-called murder weapon is completely free of blood, and the only eyewitness is standing here telling you that he _didn't_ do it. You have no proof. Honestly, I think you're just scared." She wasn't sure why she said that last part, and instantly regretted it. Taunting a cop was definitely not a good idea for someone that wanted to fly under the radar.

Johns turned furious eyes on Alex. "What did you just say?" His voice was low, cold. He gripped his hands into fists at his sides.

She swallowed her nerves down. "You're scared, all of you," she gestured to the others in an attempt to take the heat off Johns, "that there might just be something equally—maybe even more—dangerous than Riddick on this planet. Well, there is, and that's what killed Zeke."

"You say I have no proof that he did it, but do you have any proof that he didn't? For all we know you're suffering from some hallucination. And I have to wonder why you didn't speak up immediately. Why not tell us all this an hour ago when he caught him? Where have _you_ been," Johns said. Shazza, standing just to his right, was nodding her head in agreement.

"I just saw a man die," Alex said. Her voice warbled, and she couldn't keep the traumatized expression off of her face. "I just needed time."

Fry placed a hand on Alex's shoulder. "That's understandable. Why don't you tell us everything that happened? Start at the beginning, when Zeke was attacked."

Alex nodded, thankful for the blond's comforting hand. That quiet show of support seemed to give her strength. "We were in the grave, arranging the bodies for burial when Zeke noticed a hole, like a burrow or something. He kneeled down to look inside, flipped on his flashlight, and then we heard some kind of clicking noise. Before I knew what was happening, Zeke was screaming and something had pulled him halfway into the hole. I tried to grab his feet and pull him back out, but I wasn't strong enough. Then something grabbed my foot and started to pull me in too, but Riddick saved me."

"What kind of noise? Can you recreate it?" Fry's body was tense now, alert.

Alex clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, creating a surprisingly accurate imitation of the sounds she had heard just moments before Zeke's death. A chill ran down her limbs as she finished and she looked around at the others uncomfortably.

"Riddick told you he heard a noise. Was it the same?" Fry turned to Johns then.

Johns hesitated, looking at Alex with a new intensity. He seemed reluctant to answer, and when he finally did, his tone was clipped. "Spot on."

"That still doesn't prove anything," Shazza said. "We already looked in the hole and didn't see any body. There's nothing to indicate any creature was ever in there."

"That's because whatever it was probably ate him." Alex hated saying it, hated the way Shazza flinched and stared at her with hurt, angry eyes. But they had to know. "Whatever it was had the sort of claws or teeth that only predators have."

"How do you know this?" Imam looked at her in alarm.

Alex removed her shoe and held it up for everyone to see. The bottom was slashed, as if with a sharp, serrated knife. She bent the tip of the shoe back toward the heel to show that the slashes cut through the thick rubber all the way to the insole. Raking tears and punctures dotted the canvas sides, and something seemed to have bitten the laces off the top. The whole shoe was covered in blood.

"Did it hurt you," Jack asked, taking the shoe and bending it back with a look of supreme fascination on his face. "This is a lot of blood."

"No, I guess the shoe protected me," Alex lied. "That blood isn't mine."

"Then you were extremely fortunate," Imam said. He took the shoe from Jack and turned it over in his hands. "These marks could not have been made by that blade. They're too long and deep." He passed the shoe over to Johns to inspect.

"Guess we should go back and question Riddick. Hear his story. C'mon," Fry said, nudging Alex before turning and walking into the ship.

Alex snatched her shoe back from Johns and hopped into it quickly. She ran to catch up with the blond woman without waiting to see if anyone else was coming. It was a relief when none of the other survivors followed them in.

* * *

"Tell me about the sounds," Fry said as soon as Riddick was in view. She came to a stop no less than twenty feet away from the convict and crossed her arms over her chest as she awaited his response. Alex stood beside her, shifting from foot to foot uncomfortably and wondering why Fry had wanted her to come along for this.

"You mean the whispers?" Riddick's voice was soft, deep, mocking. His head was still lowered like it was when Alex had passed through before.

"What whispers?" Fry looked questioningly at Alex.

"The ones telling me to go for the sweet spot—just to the left of the spine, fourth lumbar down. The abdominal aorta. What a gusher," Riddick said, and he raised his head just enough for them to catch his rictus grin. "Had a cup on his belt, so I used it to catch a little run-off. Metallic taste to it, human blood. Coppery. But if you cut it with peppermint schnapps, that goes away. Course, that's more for winter. Summertime, I take mine straight."

Alex frowned. She wasn't sure why Riddick wasn't taking this seriously. All of the others truly believed that he was the monster Johns made him out to be, so why was he playing the role? Why was he pretending?

"Want to shock me with the truth now?" Fry's expression was unperturbed, but she was noticeably more restless on her feet.

"Everybody's so scared of me—most days I'd take that as a compliment—but it ain't me you got to worry about now." His head turned slightly, angling in Alex's direction as if he could somehow see her there through his closed eyelids.

"That's what Alex said," Fry told him. "She said you rescued her from whatever got Zeke. I want to know why you did that. I want to know what you saw and what you heard."

"Seemed a shame to let a pretty face go to waste like that," Riddick said coolly; he shrugged his shoulders nonchalantly, the chains clanging as he did so.

Alex stepped closer toward him. "Please, just tell her what happened. They won't believe just me, and they need to _know_. No one else should have to die like that."

Riddick was quiet. He raised his head fully, and though his eyes were closed his expression was thoughtful. "What makes you think anyone would believe me?"

"We're here, aren't we," Fry asked. "There's talk right now about just leaving you to die here on this rock, so you know. Alex is the only one sticking her neck out for you, so why don't you just cooperate with her? With us?"

Riddick didn't respond. He didn't even move. It seemed like he hadn't heard her at all.

"Can I see your eyes, Riddick?" Alex was about ten feet from him now. "Will you show them to me?"

"You'll need to come closer for that," he said. His voice sounded deeper, but quieter.

Alex took several slow steps forward. Fry moved closer as well, but kept behind Alex.

It was when she was only a few feet away that Riddick suddenly lunged forward, straining against the chains. His face was only scant inches away from Alex and his figure loomed above her. He opened his eyes, and though she was startled by his sudden closeness, Alex couldn't move away.

Riddick's eyes were more beautiful and eerie than she could have imagined. She had caught glimpses of them below deck earlier, but in the darkness she hadn't been able to fully make them out. Now she could see them as they gleamed down at her like silver marbles, catching and reflecting back the light. They were jaguar eyes. Predator eyes. They unsettled her.

"How can I get eyes like those?"

Everyone turned toward Jack, who had snuck into the ship behind them without their noticing. The boy was looking at Riddick now with nothing less than hero-worship.

"First you got to kill a few people," Riddick said.

"Okay, I can do it," Jack said eagerly.

"Then you got to get sent to a slam where they tell you you'll never see daylight again. You dig up a doctor and pay him 20 menthol Kools to do a surgical shine job on your eyes—"

"So you can see who's sneaking up on you in the dark." Jack smiled.

"Exactly." Riddick grinned deviously back at the boy.

"Leave," Fry barked. At the startled look on Jack's face the blond pilot softened just the tiniest bit, and in a more measured tone she said again, "Leave."

Jack scurried off through the wreckage. Fry and Alex turned back to Riddick who said, "Cute kid."

"Let's keep him that way," Alex said. She noticed that Riddick was still very close to her, and took a step back.

Riddick watched her small retreat expressionlessly. After a moment he sat back down and closed his eyes again. "Maybe I did do a few people. But I never had any intention of doing Zeke in. Wanted his breather, is all. I watched them go into the grave, saw him look into the hole. Something dragged him, ghosted his ass quick."

"And the sounds," Fry asked.

Riddick made a clicking noise with his tongue then. If Alex's imitation had been good, it was nowhere near as scarily accurate as Riddick's was. Her skin erupted in goose flesh and suddenly she felt like she was back inside the blood-drenched grave.

"That's the same sound," Fry said to Alex. "I've heard enough."

The blond turned and stalked away, heading back outside to where the others were. Alex made to follow after, but froze when Riddick spoke.

"Leg's looking good."

Panic spread through her chest as she slowly faced him. She looked down at her leg, completely healed, the skin pale and perfect. When he had pulled her from the hole her skin had been in shreds, the muscles torn and exposed. Now, the only signs that anything had happened were the rips in her pants and the blood staining her sock and shoe.

In her haste to clear his name, Alex had completely forgotten about the injuries he had seen. She hadn't considered that coming forward with the truth might expose her secret. How could she have been so stupid?

"Thought it was a pretty bad injury," Riddick went on. "I figured you for dead, once the infection set in. Maybe crippled for life, if you were lucky. Guess your luck runs deeper than most."

"Well, that depends," she said. Her hands were shaking now. Flashes of her time in the Institute ran through her mind. The cold, sterile room they kept her in. The isolation. The experiments. Dr. Farren. She couldn't let her secret get out. She couldn't risk anyone turning her over. She absolutely couldn't go back there.

"On what?"

"On whether you keep my secret." The desperation in her voice was unmistakable.

Riddick cocked his head. "What's a secret like that worth to you?"

"Everything," she said. "Anything."

"Interesting," he said.

Alex wrung her hands together. "So will you keep it to yourself?"

A slow smile spread across his lips then. It made her even more nervous. "I'm not the type to deal in other people's secrets."

"What type are you?"

"I'm the type to collect what I'm owed."

Alex didn't miss the implication. He would keep her secret, but it would cost her. She wasn't sure what the price for his silence would be, and he didn't seem inclined to tell her just yet.

She left him and joined the others back outside, trying not to dwell on the disturbing fact that she was now indebted to a murderer.

* * *

It didn't surprise Riddick when, less than an hour later, a shadow fell over him. He didn't bother looking up; he knew who it was.

"Realized there's something worse than me out there, huh?" Something _a lot_ worse, he admitted to himself.

Even Riddick had been surprised at the speed and violence of Zeke's death. And he hadn't been lying when he told Alex that he had assumed she was as good as dead. Her leg had been completely mangled when he pulled her from the grave. He had felt a disturbing sense of remorse after that, a strange wish that he had gotten to her sooner. He told himself it was because she had had such nice legs before, and it was a shame that one of them had been so disfigured.

But it wasn't disfigured. In fact, when he had watched her emerge from the nav bay to rejoin the others, that leg had been as perfect as its twin.

 _Interesting_ , he had thought.

"Here's the deal," Johns said. "You work without chains, without bit, without shivs. You do exactly what I say, when I say it."

"For what? To return to some asshole of a cell? Fuck you," Riddick bit. He was only halfway listening to Johns. His main focus was on the pistol and baton fastened to the man's belt. If he timed it perfectly, he might just be able to break his chains and grab one of the weapons before Johns managed to blow his head off with the shotgun…if he timed it _perfectly_.

"Maybe I'm just tired of chasing you. I want to be free of you as much as you want to be free of me."

Riddick turned his full attention to the man in front of him now. "You saying you'd cut me loose?"

Johns shrugged. "Far as I'm concerned, you could have died in the crash."

Riddick considered him. Did he trust Johns? Hell no. Was the offer tempting? Of course. But he couldn't shake the feeling that the devil standing in front of him wasn't being entirely straight. "My advice? Ghost me. Don't take a chance that I'll get shiv happy on your wannabe ass. It's what I would do."

A shot rang out suddenly, very close to Riddick's head. He felt his chains go slack. He pulled his arms down and rubbed his wrists, his ears ringing.

"I want you to remember this moment. The way it could have gone, and didn't." Johns looked down on him condescendingly, and then offered a hand. Riddick's goggles were dangling off one of his fingers invitingly. "C'mon. Want to sit at the grown-up table, or not?"

Riddick reached out, as if for the goggles, and then, in a movement that was too quick for Johns to react to, he snatched the shotgun away and leveled it at the other man.

Johns lifted his hands in a gesture of supplication. "Do we have a deal?" Sweat beaded on the man's brow despite his apparently calm demeanor.

"Want you to remember this moment," Riddick said. He pumped the shotgun, letting a blue shell pop out and onto the ground. He dropped the gun carelessly, snatched his goggles from Johns' raised hand, and walked away.

He heard the man curse as he bent to retrieve the gun, and Riddick smiled. It gave him great satisfaction to get under Johns' skin. He knew what it must have cost the other man to come here, to accept the fact that Riddick hadn't been the one responsible for the bloody mess inside that grave, to admit that Riddick might have actually _saved_ someone. That must have chapped Johns' ass.

Riddick emerged into the blue sunlight outside. He hurried to put the goggles back over his sensitive eyes. Figured that he'd had his eyes shined to help him see in the dark, and then he wound up on a planet with three fucking suns.

The other survivors looked at Riddick with open terror and unguarded wariness. They gave him a wide berth as they went about gathering oxygen cans, liquor bottles, umbrellas, and anything else deemed essential. Fry and Imam pulled a power cell from the ship's battery bay and laid it amongst the other items on the makeshift sled that Zeke had used to cart off the dead. Before Zeke had become one of the dead.

Shazza, Alex, Jack, and a couple of the pilgrims had taken up the job of carefully filling in the grave with dirt. As they finished they all headed back toward the ship, each of them covered in sweat and taking deep hits from their breather units. All except for Alex, who didn't seem to be feeling the effects of the planet's low oxygen and three suns the way the others did.

Riddick noticed, with no small amount of amusement, that the kid Jack seemed especially excited to see him free of chains. The boy looked as though he wanted to approach Riddick, but Shazza quickly collared him and pulled him into the shade of the ship. Alex also appraised Riddick, and, while she didn't seem to be afraid, she was definitely cautious. She must still be worried that he'd let her secret out, and he didn't blame her. It would be foolish to just take some stranger on their word, especially when there was so much at stake.

He had noticed the Chasers at the docking port when Johns had taken him in. At the time he had assumed they were after some weasel that had screwed over a crime lord, the usual sort of lowlife Chaser target. But now Riddick realized that those rent-a-mercs were there looking for Alex. Her strange healing ability had obviously caught the attention of someone important, someone with enough money to hire a team of Chasers to bring her in. That's why she had been so desperate for him to keep her secret to himself.

To say Riddick was intrigued would be an understatement. It wasn't often that someone caught, and held, his interest the way Alex had. Usually he figured people out quickly, but she was a mystery.

And he wanted to know more.

* * *

Alex had been surprised when so many people offered to help her fill in the grave. She had thought it would be a struggle to get even one more person to help, especially after the way everyone had stared at her when she came forward about Zeke's death. But it seemed that where she had failed to convince the others about the danger hidden in the grave, Fry had succeeded.

With Shazza's, Jack's, Hassan's, and Suleiman's help, the grave was filled in record time. With every foot of dirt returned to the ditch, Alex's anxiety began to abate. She wouldn't feel fully at ease again until they made it off this planet, but knowing that the hole, and the creature within it, was buried again definitely soothed her nerves.

When they finished, Alex followed the others back to the ship. Everyone but her was hot, sweating, and tired. It hadn't felt like much work to her, but she figured that the others were struggling from the exertion because it made it that much harder for them to breathe.

It was on her way back to the ship that Alex noticed Riddick walk casually outside. The chains had been removed from his wrists and he was wearing his goggles again. From the unhurried way he walked, she guessed that this time, instead of escaping, he had been released. That could only mean that Johns saw more use in his being free than cuffed and blindfolded.

Alex couldn't contain the sudden lurch of worry in her gut as she eyed the convict. Could she really trust him not to spill her secret? She was certain the payday on her head was exorbitant—Dr. Farren would spare no expense in getting her back—and it would be enough to tempt any decent person to give her up. And Alex wasn't sure decency was something Riddick had in spades. He was an admitted murderer, after all, even though he did save her once already.

He looked at her then, his goggles flashing. She looked back at him for just a moment. She couldn't help the part of her that felt weirdly fascinated by him, but she _could_ fight against it. It wouldn't do her any good to become any more involved with Riddick than she already was; she couldn't afford for him to discover any more of her secrets.

Alex forced herself to look away from him and continue on into the ship. She ignored the feeling of eyes on her retreating form and went straight for her discarded bag.

Her pants were practically in tatters now and she wanted to change out of them before the group left for the settlement the hunting party had discovered earlier. She fished around in the bag for the stretchy shorts. She had a pair of cargo pants, but they were big and she didn't want to have to keep pulling them up or risk flashing everyone her bare butt. Underwear was something she refused to steal used from anybody.

When she had the shorts in hand, Alex ducked behind a fallen cryo-chamber, glanced around to make sure no one was nearby, and quickly changed. The shorts came to mid-thigh, and just barely peeked out from below the hem of her plaid shirt. They were tight, though not uncomfortably so, and made from highly durable material.

She dropped her ruined pants onto the top of the cryo-chamber and walked back around to her bag. She hoisted her belongings onto her shoulder and stepped around the corner to walk back outside, but nearly slammed face-first into someone.

Alex yelped and backed up a step, almost falling.

"Careful there," Johns said. He had a hand out toward her, as if readying to catch her.

Alex straightened; she was very aware that had Johns shown up seconds before he might have caught her in a state of undress. As it was, he was looking at her with an expression of blatant appreciation, his stare lingering on her bare legs.

"We're moving out," Johns said. His pale blue eyes met hers then and a smirk played across his mouth.

"Right," Alex said. She stepped around him. "Thanks."

"Cute shorts," he said after she had walked past him.

A slimy feeling slid down Alex's spine, but she didn't respond to him. Instead, she held her head high and walked out of the ship.

She imagined Johns was still sore with her for contradicting his version of events surrounding Zeke's death. She couldn't help that; she wasn't the type of person to withhold the truth, especially when someone's life was on the line. And the other's _had_ been considering leaving Riddick to die. Still, Alex wanted to keep Johns' attention off of her, and not just because he was a cop that might seek to profit from her secret. Because he was a man whose stare made her uncomfortable in a decidedly unpleasant way.

There was no real reason for her to feel this way. In fact, it was Riddick who should have inspired such feelings, but the opposite seemed to be true. Maybe this was just proof that something was seriously messed up in Alex's head. Well, she couldn't help that either.

Outside the ship the other survivors were beginning the trek toward the settlement. Many of them had bags slung over their shoulders as well, and everyone but Riddick and Alex had a breathing unit.

The blue sun had already begun its descent on the horizon and the other two suns were slowly rising in the distance. The strange mix of light fell over the group and made it impossible to look in any direction without squinting.

Riddick was at the back of the group, pulling the heavy sled laden down with belongings. Alex tried not to frown about him being treated like a carriage ox, and the fact that no one had deemed him worthy of a breathing unit. It didn't seem wise to question Johns' about Riddick's treatment again, especially when the cop seemed less than thrilled about having the convict join the group. At least that's the impression Alex got based on the contemptuous looks he kept throwing over his shoulder toward Riddick.

So she kept silent and instead found herself wondering why Johns had let Riddick go to begin with. What sort of bargain had they struck? It must have been something that benefited Riddick, otherwise why play beast of burden for them?

She shook her head then. Whatever the answers to those questions were, it didn't matter. She was resolved not to become further entangled with the convict. He was far too observant, and she just couldn't risk it.

Alex fell into step beside Jack and Shazza. The wild-haired woman was friendlier toward her now that Fry had convinced them all that Riddick was innocent (this time, at least).

"All right, there?" Shazza looked pointedly at Alex's legs.

She shrugged. "My pants were torn so badly they might as well have been shorts anyway."

"Maybe you can get a tan," Jack said.

Alex laughed. "There's looking on the bright side."

* * *

 **A/N:** There it is folks. So, the scene where Fry crawls into the hole to look for Zeke's body was obviously cut from my story. I just felt like it wouldn't make sense, especially since there's an eyewitness there and evidence to corroborate her story. Anywho, I hope you enjoyed the chapter. I will try to update soon. Let me know what you think!


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